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DDT didn’t do-in whooping cranes either

Unless hunters were blasting whooping cranes with DDT shotgun shells…

About the rebound in whooping crane population, John Crisp writes for Scripps-Howard:

… Undermined by habitat loss, hunting and DDT, in the 1940s the entire whooping crane world population dropped to around 20 birds. Now the primary flock, which spends the winter at the Aransas National Wildlife Refuge on the Texas coast, numbers around 300. Including reintroduced flocks and birds in captivity, somewhere between 500 and 600 whooping cranes are alive today…

In addition to the fact that no study shows that environmental exposures to DDT affect bird reproduction, DDT wasn’t approved as an agricultural insecticide until 1945, and didn’t hit peak use until about 1960.

The whooping crane population was done in, as Crisp correctly points out, by habitat loss, encroachment and hunting — but there is no evidence that DDT played any role.

4 thoughts on “DDT didn’t do-in whooping cranes either”

As we all know from Fakegate and associated media coverage: actual facts and truth are totally disposible to the modern journalist. What matters more than reality is one’s “perspective” and imputed motives.

This is how the Audobon Society is allowed to disavow its own Christmas Bird Count data (the only reliable national data on which to judge DDT’s impact on birds) showing a steady and strong GROWTH in bald eagle numbers prior to and continuing throughtout the period of DDT use. At no point during the period when DDT is used is there evidence of a bird population decline of any kind. NONE. There is ZERO correlation between DDT use and bird populations. (check data on bald eagles, peregrine falcons, and brown pelicans — all near extinction prior to any use of DDT anywhere, and whose populations grew steadily throughout the DDT era)

It is so sad that something so easily verified is simply ignored completely in favor of a fabricated political narrative.
Alex Avery
Hudson Institute’s Center for Global Food Issues

Perhaps, like modern environmentalists, they were scared to death of what MIGHT happen someday.
“As scary words of tongue and pen, the worst are these, ‘It Might Have Been’.” (with apologies to John Greenleaf Whittier)

I am grateful that Steve keeps plugging away at this because this kind of misinformation is unending. At least this way “real” people can at learn the truth. As for these self-righteous anti-pesticide (especially anti-DDT) groups who will not be convinced no matter what information is presented… they are simply time wasters.

“and DDT” This becomes a part of the litany, use tthe phrase even though it has nothing to do with the problem.
An example: A jogger vanished in Sidney MT last month and two men were arrested for her kidnaping and murder. They were from western Colorado and one had been recently released from jail to vist a sick relative in Texas, he joined up with the other perp and they fled to MT where they kidnapped, raped and killed an innocent woman. When the story was reported in USA Today,it read “Oil boom in Montana and North Dakota increases crime rate.” This had nothing to do with oil.